One Snowy Night

by Rita Bradshaw

She met his eyes and for a moment the look they exchanged took them back to when they were just a young lass and lad making plans for the future they’d share together, a future in which they had never pictured anything else but having their own little home and family, of growing old together and watching their grandchildren arrive in their golden years. Through her whirling emotions, she said softly, ‘But she is yours, your daughter, part of you.’

  ‘Oh, Ruby.’ It was a groan and the echo of it was in her own heart. In the time since she had left Sunderland she’d told herself that she and Adam would never have been totally happy together, that in maturing as she had it would have caused problems between them sooner or later, that their marriage would have suffered the more she thought for herself and threw off the tight confines of life as a working-class wife and mother. And all that was probably true. But it didn’t lessen the ache within her right now for what might have been.

  Pulling herself together, she said quietly, ‘Try and be happy, Adam.’ Something warned her not to mention her sister’s name, so she just said, ‘For your sake and Alice’s.’

  He made no reply but his chin jerked slightly.

  Holding out her hand, she said, ‘Can we part as friends?’

  ‘It should be me saying that after what I did.’ He took her small gloved hand in his own rough one, holding it as he stared down at the fine leather. No women in their community would have worn gloves like this. It further emphasized just how different their lives had become.

  The next moment she was walking away, and as he stood there in the whirling flakes of white and watched her go, the pain was as intense as on that snowy night four years ago. More so, perhaps, he acknowledged grimly, because ridiculously, deep, deep down in his subconscious, he’d always harboured the tiniest hope that one day they would get together again, that a miracle would happen. But that most fragile of dreams was over, gone, finished. Just by her lack of condemnation and bitterness towards him she had destroyed it. It was as she had said: she had moved on with her life and there was no place for him in it now.

  He removed his cap, banging the snow off it against his trousers and putting it back on his head.

  Maybe he had always known it was only an impossible dream but that didn’t make it any the easier to let go of it.

  She was lost to view now but still he didn’t move; not until a couple of nattering old wives passed him, staring curiously before continuing their gossiping, did he force his feet to begin walking, and then it was slowly, like an old, old man.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Olive carefully placed Adam’s evening meal in front of him and then fetched her plate from the side of the range and sat down at the table before she said, ‘Well, we knew it was coming, didn’t we?’

  It was the last day of April and the coal owners had closed every pit in the country, the miners being locked out once again. As soon as the New Year had started it had been obvious that the coal owners and the big employers in every industry had been set to crack down on the working man, and miners in particular. Her da had explained it to her by saying that countries like Japan, America, Germany and others were now producing cheaper and better goods than Britain, but instead of British manufacturers making something better or different, they were carrying on in the same old way and dealing with the competition by lowering their prices; and the only way they could do this without touching the profits that financed their great big houses and extravagant way of living was to reduce the wages of their workers and increase their hours whilst cutting expenditure on safety.

  In the last weeks, the phrase, Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day, had been adopted by the miners, but her da, like many others, hadn’t held out any hope that a showdown could be averted. ‘Churchill is itching for a fight,’ he’d said the last time she’d called round with Alice a couple of days ago and told him Adam thought a strike was inevitable, ‘and Baldwin will leave it all to him to deal with, you mark my words. Baldwin’s more concerned with keeping his job as Prime Minister than anything else.’

  ‘Aye, we knew it was coming.’ Adam looked at her. There wasn’t a jack man who hadn’t known what the owners were about. ‘But it will get nasty, you know that, don’t you? There’s no negotiating with them up top, whatever they might say to the contrary. The only hope we’ve got is if the TUC follow through and back us and the trade union leaders bring every working man out in the country.’

  ‘Do you think that’ll happen?’ Part of Olive couldn’t believe they were having a conversation like any normal married couple. There had been a change in Adam, and if she pinpointed to when it had begun, she could trace it back to the time Ruby had visited. It had been around then that he had started to talk to her civilly and show an interest in their daughter. She’d spent days tormenting herself by wondering if Adam and Ruby had met and what had gone on between them, and whether the mellowing in his manner had been a result of Ruby taking him to task. And then reason had asserted itself. It didn’t matter how the change had come. It was enough that it had happened. She had decided at that point that she’d ask no questions, not of Adam nor of her sister when she saw her next, whenever that might be. She had no right to be jealous that Adam still loved Ruby. That was what she told herself a hundred times a day.

  Adam swallowed the mouthful of meat roll in his mouth before he said, ‘Do I think it’ll happen? Maybe, but I have me doubts whether men like Jimmy Thomas or Walter Citrine will put their necks on the line for us miners if push comes to shove. They’ve not got the backbone to take on the government, in my opinion.’

  ‘So all this will be for nothing?’

  Adam shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘Who knows?’

  Alice had been busy tucking into her dinner – meat roll was her favourite meal – and now as she scraped the last morsel from her plate, she said, ‘More please, Mam?’

  Olive smiled. She loved to see the child eat well. ‘That’s all there is, Alice. Mam’ll get you a bit of stottie cake.’

  ‘Here.’ Adam tipped a good half of the meat roll left on his plate onto the child’s, and as Olive made a sound of protest in her throat, he said, ‘She’s a growing bairn, aren’t you, hinny?’ and Alice beamed at him.

  Olive said nothing more but got up on the pretext of bringing the teapot to the table. There was a pain in her that had been growing over the last little while, and it wasn’t just that Alice seemed to have transferred the main source of her affection to Adam – although if she was honest that did hurt – but seeing Adam’s tenderness with the bairn caused a physical ache she couldn’t define deep inside.

  He hadn’t touched her in bed for weeks, and at first she had been relieved and thankful. She was still relieved and thankful, she told herself fiercely. Of course she was. Who wouldn’t be? Every time he had taken her it had been in the form of a punishment, she knew that, but in this relaxing of his attitude towards her she had thought that maybe . . .

  What? she questioned herself bitterly as she poured a cup of tea for herself and Adam, black and without sugar – any milk was still for Alice. That he might grow to like her? Want her? Not for the release of his body but because . . .

  She mentally shook her head at herself and her stupidity, but her train of thought had forced her to recognize something she had been fighting in the last days and with it came a bitter humiliation that exceeded anything she’d suffered thus far. She cared about him. It had only taken this change in him, after all he had put her through, for her to absolve him of the years of torment, which was as degrading as it was mortifying.

  Adam was talking again, saying something about the number of Royal Commissions various governments in the past had set up to look into the wages and working conditions and safety in the coal industry, and how they weren’t worth the paper they were written on, but although Olive made the appropriate responses, her mind was working on a different plain altogether.

  He would never love her and there was nothing she could do to change that. It w
asn’t just that she was as plain as a pikestaff and with about as little shape as one, but she’d been the means of him losing the woman he loved. Not just loved – worshipped, adored.

  She became aware of holding her cup so tightly that her knuckles shone white, and she made herself put it down carefully and then relax her fingers, one by one. She had thought she’d been glad when Ruby had returned and they had made their peace, and she was, in one way. But in another . . .

  She drew in a long, silent breath. In another way, her sister’s visit had opened a whole different can of worms, for her, at least.

  ‘Here, look at this.’ Adam passed her a piece of paper and she saw it was one of the local trade union bulletins. ‘They’re quoting something from a paper called the “Fifth Report” that was apparently written at the end of the war by a committee of churches looking into the working conditions of miners and factory workers and the like. Our leaders are saying it sums up what we’re fighting for now, but another way of looking at it is, if the government and the upper classes didn’t take any notice then, why are they going to now?’

  Olive forced herself to concentrate as she read:

  ‘By “a living wage” we mean not merely a wage which is sufficient for physical existence but a wage adequate to maintain the worker, his wife and family, in health and honour, and to enable him to dispense with the subsidiary earnings of his children up to the age of sixteen years. By “reasonable hours” we mean hours sufficiently short not merely to leave him unexhausted but to allow him sufficient leisure and energy for home life, for recreation, for the development through study of his mind and spirit, and for participation in the affairs of the community. We hold that the payment of such a wage in return for such hours of work ought to be the first charge upon every industry.’

  When she’d finished reading the paper, Olive raised her head and looked at her husband as Adam said, ‘That’s what I want for us and for the bairn. It’s a basic human right, surely? And yet if we voice such things the working class are held up as a lot of useless whingers who haven’t got the sense to do anything more than to labour like animals.’

  Olive stared at him. She hadn’t heard anything past the ‘us’. It was the first time in her marriage Adam had referred to them as such.

  ‘I might be looking on the black side, Olive, but I can’t see that a strike will persuade them at the top to regard working people as human beings. I hope I’m wrong, but when I see pictures of Churchill in his nice suit and with a cigar the size of a bazooka sticking out of his mouth, it’s like he’s from another planet, and the same goes for the rest of the government. They talk about us as the “New Red Threat” and being “Worse than the Hun”, but I work with blokes who fought in the war and would fight again if their country needed them. No, this is going to be a long bitter fight and I’ve no idea whether it’ll be worth it in the long run.’

  It was the most he’d said to her at one time in the whole of their four years together. Quietly, she said, ‘We’ll get through, Adam. You’re fighting for Alice’s future and all the other bairns who weren’t born with a silver spoon in their mouths.’

  He raked back the curls that always fell over his forehead as he muttered, ‘I don’t know if you’ll still see it that way when we can’t pay the rent and there’s nowt to put on the table.’

  It struck her anew how handsome he was. ‘Oh, aye, I will, have no doubt about that.’

  He met her eyes and as she held his gaze, he said softly, ‘I believe you will at that.’

  It was a start, she thought, her heart thudding painfully. If nothing else, it was a start.

  Three days later the General Strike was on. Workers in almost every industry laid down their tools and walked out. Buses, trams and trains stopped, factories and docks were deserted and even offices were empty. And in the same breath, the government went into action. A formal state of emergency was declared and a class war split Britain as undergraduates, stockbrokers, barristers and other white-collar professionals realized boyhood fantasies and climbed on the footplates of strikebound trains and worked up steam. Others drove London’s buses and lorries filled with essential food supplies, and still more lined up in the quadrangle of the Foreign Office to sign with the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, or queued at London police stations to be sworn in as special constables. It was a lark, a break from routine, they said, and although they had a good income and many came from wealthy families, the government was paying them £1 15s a week to do the work, as well as a further £1 14s 6d for food and 5s for clothing. A total of £3 14s 6d a week for work that ordinary folk could do far better, and were fighting for the right to do for much less.

  ‘They’re laughing at us,’ Adam said bitterly to Olive a few days into the strike. ‘The TUC has given a guarantee that their members will supply food, hospital supplies and essentials, and carry on doing slum clearance and building hospitals, but Churchill will have none of it. He wants to paint us as black as the ace of spades. There’s the navy mooring its submarines and destroyers along the docks of all the major rivers, marines marching with fixed bayonets to escort trams, the army driving through streets in armoured cars and tanks rolling up, and the police using their truncheons to knock hell out of us every chance they get. Churchill’s declared war on us and now he’s gone this far he can’t be seen to lose. And them damn university students and the rest of the upper classes who’d never stoop to dirty their hands in the normal run of things think it’s all great fun to drive buses and load lorries and play at driving trains.’

  Olive stared at him. She wondered what his reaction would be if she told him about Edward Forsythe. Ruby had one foot in the working class and one foot in the upper, and that wouldn’t go down well, not how things were. And Ruby’s great friend, Clarissa, sounded even grander than her brother. Ruby was consorting with the enemy, that’s how Adam would see it, she knew that.

  It was on the tip of her tongue to speak. To say something casually, wryly perhaps, like, ‘I wonder if Ruby’s new friends are doing their bit then,’ but as she looked at Adam’s troubled face the words died before they were voiced. She knew he was worried to death about the outcome of the strike. It was clear now that the government, and in particular Churchill and his cronies, had been setting up the O.M.S., the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, for a long time, probably since the 1921 lockout, in fact. The stockpiling that had gone on was evidence that they had anticipated a national strike and had been organized and waiting to spring into action. Adam and her da and others were sure that it had always been Churchill’s intention to let the strike happen so he could show the working class who was boss once and for all, and keep them on their knees for ever. She didn’t know about that, she was no politician, but if Adam said it, it was good enough for her.

  And so she now said, ‘I was round Mam’s today and Da said Churchill’s brought out a new newspaper called The British Gazette and he’s saying whatever he likes in it.’

  Adam nodded. ‘Aye, I heard about it from one of the lads. There’ll be nothing bad about the government in it and nothing good about us, you can be sure of that.’

  They were sitting in the kitchen and it was dark outside, Alice had long since been in bed. Olive was seated at the scrubbed table doing some darning by the light of an oil lamp, and Adam was reclining in a battered armchair in front of the range, his slippered feet on the fender. It was a scene that would have been unthinkable just weeks ago, and this was at the forefront of Olive’s mind as Adam continued to talk about the ins and outs of the strike. He and his brothers had congregated at his mam’s that afternoon to chew things over together with their father, and he had taken Alice with him, saying Fred was going to bring his three bairns and it would be nice for Alice to play with her cousins. Fred’s wife was overdue with her fourth and as big as a house.

  For practically the first time since she’d had Alice, apart from once or twice when she had left the child with her mother for an hour or
so when the weather had been atrocious and she’d needed to do some shopping, she had been on her own and she had hated it. It had seemed an eternity until she had heard them in the yard, Alice giggling on Adam’s shoulders, and she had felt ridiculously tearful when Adam had walked in.

  Not for the first time, she wondered how she was going to fill her days when Alice started school after her fifth birthday. She knew Adam wouldn’t agree to any suggestion that she work outside these four walls; as far as he was concerned, once a woman had a bairn her place was in the home and that was that. Admittedly they were in a better position than many families who had several bairns and just one wage packet coming in, but things were still tight. She had to watch every penny and she was canny with her housekeeping, only buying scrag ends and brisket and other meat that needed long, slow cooking and could stretch to a second or even third meal when the leftovers were used for broths and stews or meat rolls and panackelties. She knew of families in her own street who existed on a staple diet of tea, bread, margarine, potatoes and cheap jam, the shadow of the workhouse forever hanging over them. Even the butcher’s offal was beyond their reach, or the herring that was often plentiful at the height of summer.

  Adam had lapsed into silence, staring into the glowing coals of the fire in the range as his mind turned over some of what had been said between the men that afternoon, things he wouldn’t worry Olive with. Since the statement from Downing Street encouraging strikers to go back to work by saying the government would protect them from any loss of trade union benefits and that the courts would take action against any union that expelled a member for returning to work, and that anybody caught jeering or insulting such a person would be liable to a fine of forty shillings, things had taken a nasty turn. Men were being arrested, quickly convicted and sentenced to hard labour, and anyone found picketing on main roads could now be jailed for ‘interfering with the King’s Highway’. Trade union offices had been ransacked, private papers, printers and typewriters removed, funds frozen and anyone in the building at the time arrested. His da had heard on the grapevine that in some places the mounted police along with their bruisers on the ground had laid into folk with their truncheons, and that university students, members of sporting clubs and the Fascist Movement were looking on attacking the strikers as entertainment. They were being thrown to the wolves, his da had said, and when Lord Londonderry, the Durham coal owner, had said publicly that he wanted ‘them smashed from top to bottom’, he was only voicing what the government and the upper classes were thinking.